PiNZ Council 2017-18 Overview

PiNZ Council 2017-18 Overview

It’s been a great year establishing ourselves as a new group of councilors alongside Nandor our chairman. We have been learning the ropes, getting to know each other and how we work best together with the blend of our different skills set. Our main starting point was to dive into the PiNZ 10 year Strategic Plan, to understand the direction we were heading for as an organisation. We also spent time figuring out the priorities of the plan, and where each of us had time and passion to give.

The key areas we decided that needed the most energy flow were:

Get the new Website Live, which needed us to focus on our…

Communications Plan so that we had clear, updated approaches to create easy…

On-Going Engagement with our Members, our main avenues here is the website and the quarterly newsletters.

We have been developing the relationship role of Hui Support, so the right help and guidance are available for the teams who wish to host a Hui in their local community.

The aim is that these and other actions from the council will help to

Grow the Financial Base of the Organisation that supports the charitable trust and the work it does.

Develop the relationships we have with the Permaculture Education Guild (PEG) to help build the Permaculture Educational Pathways within NZ.

As council members, we meet face to face every 3 months in focused work sessions; and, we talk online every month to keep each other updated on the projects we're working on. We have found that throughout the year the diversity of a large council (9) is good and spreads the council workload well, however, it can also make meetings (especially the voice meets) clunky and inefficient – slowing down the processes and making it harder to get a quorum.

The PiNZ council have agreed that 7 is the optimum council number to keep things moving efficiently. So this was raised at the AGM in May, and a new quota was agreed upon by those present. There are many co-opted roles available that help support the PiNZ organisation without having to be a council member. Let the council know if your keen to get involved in any way. The easiest way is the website - share & promote your permaculture activities, knowledge and resources so that we can collectively grow permaculture in New Zealand together.

We wish to say a Big Thanks Guenther, Kharen, and Louise for all their input and hard work done over this last year as council members! It has been great fun and informative being in conversations together. We look forward to hearing about all your new ventures.

We also like to thank Claire Wimmer for bookkeeping role, Adam Shand for Managing the national facebook group page and Erwin, for the building of the new website and the development work to date! Thank you all for your time, we couldn’t do this without you.

And also, big thanks to Richard for the longtime care and running the old Website!

Special thanks to Eco Matters for the hospitality of housing our F2F meetings and to Guenther for all the Sat night filled with scummy pizza's!